IVF creates fetuses with three parents

By Shaoni Bhattacharya in San Antonio

A WOMAN has become pregnant through a procedure that combines a controversial IVF method with one of the techniques used for cloning. But the fetuses that resulted, although they did not survive to term, were certainly not clones. In fact, they had three genetic parents.

The procedure involves transferring a fertilised nucleus from the mother’s egg to an egg from another women (see Graphic). Any child born this way would inherit the vast majority of its genes from its mother and father, like a normal baby, but the handful of genes found outside …

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